6 ways to make sure your website is in shape for 2010

From time to time it’s important to check on the health of your website.  During these next few days, which are likely to be slow in most offices as the year draws to a close, why not take some time to give your online presence a quick inspection?  These are things we might not regularly give much thought to, but it’s important to check on them from time to time, to make sure a site is in shape.  Here are a few things I recommend:

• Check your domain registration renewal date.  How long is it until your domain name expires?  SEO experts agree that it’s advantageous to register your domain name for a long period of time.  It could help to boost your rankings, since Google and other search engines are less likely to find spammy pages on sites that are registered for a long time.  At $10/year or so for a .com domain name, it’s a no-brainer investment for businesses.
  
• Return Path’s Sender Score email reputation checker (hat tip to Jeanne Jennings at ClickZ) is a great little tool for making sure your email deliverability is strong.  It rates your overall sender score on a 100-point scale.  The basic version of the tool is free, but by completing a free registration on the site, you’ll get details on several other key metrics that factor into your overall score – including number of complaints, volume of email sent, external reputation, number of unknown users, and the number of spam traps your emails have hit.
  
• Hubspot’s Website Grader is an excellent tool that measures some of the most important metrics for your site’s search engine effectiveness, blogging and social media presence, etc.  This is a must-run report for your website as you think about your 2010 plans.
  
• Marketleap’s Link Popularity Check and Search Engine Saturation reports used to be some of my favorite tools for checking on the SEO health of a website.  But when I tried to use them about a month ago, they didn’t work.  Then I spotted a small blurb on their site explaining that as of Nov. 15, 2009, these tools have been discontinued.  The pages still exist on their website and you can enter your site, but they don’t appear to work anymore.  (I’m not sure why a company would discontinue this type of a tool, which probably generated millions of page views over the years.)  They recommend two other tools, SEObook.com and SEOMoz.com, but I haven’t gotten nearly as much value out of these sites’ tools as I did from Marketleap.  If anyone has a good suggestion for tools to replace Marketleap, please add a comment below.
  
• Google Trends (one of the Google Labs tools) allows you to estimate the size of multiple sites in a graph.  Just go to trends.google.com/websites and enter multiple sites in the search box.  This is a quick and handy tool for figuring out roughly how big a site is.  Trafficestimate.com is another.
  
• WeBuildPages.com has a number of helpful SEO-related utilities, including a Spider Viewer that shows you what the Googlebot sees when it visits your site.  This can be quite enlightening.  Make sure you’re putting your best foot forward with search engine spiders!

Photo by Usodesita

2010: The rise of social-enabled web advertising

If 2009 will be remembered as the year social media went mainstream, 2010 will see an extension of the social media proliferation into more traditional media platforms.  One example I’m keeping my eye on is SocialMedia.com, and its goal to incorporate social media into different types of web advertising.  (Just to clarify, I’m not talking about buying ads on social media websites like Facebook.)

This year was a perfect opportunity for marketers to experiment with social media, since marketing budgets in all industries were slashed and marketers had fewer dollars to spend on traditional marketing programs.  You can’t beat the price of setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook fan page – free!  But those same marketers also realized that while the cash outlay might be nil, a significant amount of time and effort is required to do social media the right way.   Social media can be a powerful mouthpiece, but to be most effective it needs to be used with other forms of marketing and promotion – and that’s where I think we’re headed in 2010.

More than a decade ago, banners brought advertising to the web, but they often weren’t relevant to the viewer and didn’t receive much interaction.  Then Google AdWords made advertising relevant by placing ads alongside search results, but Google’s text ads aren’t social.  What if you could make web ads both relevant and social?  That’s the next logical step – and it’s exactly what companies like SocialMedia.com are trying to do.  Click here to see a simple explanation on the company’s website.  In a nutshell, this new form of web display (banner) advertising brings social media directly into the ad, to allow users to interact with their social network through the ad.  In some of SocialMedia.com’s examples, their ads allow you to tweet about a movie to your friends, pass along your thoughts about a product with your network, or even share a video virally with your social circles – all without leaving the ad.

Social-enabled web advertising addresses several realities marketers are facing:
1.  Web display ad clickthrough rates are plummeting, so advertisers want to find ways to boost interaction and engagement with their ads
2.  Everyone’s flocking to social media, and a marketing manager’s boss is likely to ask “What’s our company doing?”
3.  Spending money on social media is harder than spending an advertising budget

I expect digital agencies to embrace in-ad social advertising, because it gives them a bigger role in social media.  It lets companies spend money through a more traditional channel – on advertising – but in a way that supports the brand’s social efforts.  Plus it’s easily scalable, to give companies the ability to funnel money toward a particular social initiative quickly and easily.  And perhaps most importantly, it’s a really sexy recommendation to make to a client!

I’m not prepared to say social-enabled web advertising is the next Twitter.  But as the social media stakes get higher, I believe plenty of marketers will turn to in-ad social advertising to boost their Twitter following or juice their Facebook page’s impact.

How to make your industrial website more than just a catalog of products

I spend a lot of time poking around manufacturing-related websites.   This includes companies that are making products, but also companies who are trying to sell to the companies that are making products.  One thing that has become very clear to me:  Most manufacturers’ websites fall short.

Some manufacturers are good at presenting their products on their website, providing pricing, and sometimes even sharing ordering or detailed distributor information.  But very few manufacturers unlock the great amount of knowledge that’s present in their employees and provide this information to potential customers through their site.  They’re makers, not marketers.  They’re engineers, not communicators.

Whether your company is a small manufacturer of commodity products, or if you’re a huge global maker of highly specialized goods, you need to figure out how to produce content.  When done properly, online content is a differentiator, a competitive advantage, and a tool for winning and retaining business.  Your company is an expert at what it does – so why not show the market how smart you are?

There are dozens of ways to get into content marketing, but some of the easiest can be started by a small company with very little effort.  For a larger manufacturer, a more coordinated strategy is probably necessary, to ensure the information is distributed consistently and your different divisions or departments aren’t talking over each other.

A few ideas to get you started:

1.  Start a blog.
Begin slowly at first, until you develop a consistent frequency and voice.  Then once you get going, you can launch a promotion strategy to ensure your blog is seen by the right people.  There are hundreds of tutorials on the web that can teach you how to use a blog for establishing your company as a thought leader.  One word of advice: Don’t just blog about your company’s new products or when you do something newsworthy.  That misses the point.  People skip those blogs, so you’re just wasting your time.  You should be blogging about topics and issues that matter to your customers.

2.  Use Twitter.
If you don’t have the time or discipline to do a blog the right way, a Twitter presence can help you get a simple voice into the market.  (Of course Twitter can complement a blogging strategy nicely too.)  It’s now relatively easy to embed your Twitter feed into your company’s website, so you can offer your tweets to anyone who comes to your site.  The drawback is Twitter’s 140 character limit – which is great for sharing relevant web links with your audience and distributing a few simple thoughts.  But anything more deep will require a different medium.

3.  Write white papers.
This is fairly familiar territory to many industrial companies.  When done correctly, they can be a great vehicle for thought leadership.  However, make sure the tone is correct.  If the white paper is nothing more than a veiled sales pitch for your new product, it will have limited effectiveness.

4.  Try some video.
Thanks to sites like YouTube, web video is being made more simple every day.  There are different levels of sophistication to web video – and each requires an increasing level of skill.  Any beginner can get a Flip video camera, shoot a video, and upload it to YouTube.  It won’t look polished or super professional, but depending on your target audience, it could do the trick for making your company appear smart, nimble, and accessible.

5.  Get a freelancer.
This is a great option for larger companies that have knowledge embedded within a big group of distributed people within their organization.  If you have 50 or 500 experts in your company, it’s often unrealistic to teach all of them how to blog and to develop a cohesive blogging strategy.  But if you find a freelancer who is well-versed in bringing information to an industrial audience, they can tap into the springs of knowledge in your company and pull out the best pieces, then develop it into a consistent voice that can make its way to your market.

In conclusion:
No matter which of these approaches you choose, remember that the key isn’t the production quality or the presentation -- it’s the content.  Of course you don’t want to put something into the market that makes your company look completely unprofessional.  However, an audience will excuse a simple looking blog or a video with relatively low production value if the content is relevant and engaging.  Craigslist is an perfect example of this principle.  It’s one of the most popular sites on the web, but it’s far from the nicest looking.  It’s the valuable content that makes you a market leader.

When bad content is profitable: The Demand Media business model

While eating lunch at my desk today, I read an interesting article about a company called Demand Media in the November issue of Wired magazine.  Then later in the day, on the media site FOLIO:, I saw a blog post by Jason Fell with some thoughts on the article from a media perspective.

Demand Media has made a $200 million a year business from churning out an insane amount of quick, cheap, super-targeted content. (For example, videos about “how to heel flip on a skateboard” and “where can I donate a car in Dallas” are both mentioned in the Wired article).

I found it especially interesting to read the online comments below both articles.  They range from fear and disgust (editors lamenting the good old days of journalism and saying Demand Media is nothing but a slave labor house that’s exploiting writers and videographers) to people annoyed at Demand Media “junking up the web” with so much cheaply produced content.

Many comments focus on the low quality of the content from a journalistic standpoint and from a reader standpoint.  And while that might be true, this exact characteristic – generally low quality – makes the content more profitable as a whole.  Here’s what I mean:

There’s an old journalism axiom about leaving your audience “hungry for more.”  You’re never supposed to completely answer the audience’s questions about the topic or fully satisfy their desire for information.  You want to make them think, ask questions, and have a hunger to learn more.  This works perfectly with Demand Media’s business model, because Demand wouldn’t earn nearly as much money if its content fully satisfied viewers’ needs.

According to the Wired article, Demand makes a large amount of its money from pay-per-click ads that appear next to its content, including Google AdSense, and YouTube ads.  So if Demand’s videos and articles fully satisfied a viewer’s needs, the user could simply close their browser and be happy with the information they just received – without clicking on any links.  But I suspect the less-than-perfect quality of Demand’s content actually boosts the company’s ad earnings, because when users view a video that doesn’t quite answer their question or read an article that falls short, they still probably want to find an answer elsewhere on the web.  Luckily for the user, they see a Google ad adjacent to the Demand content that looks encouraging, so they click it.  Demand makes money from that click.  Bingo.  Lower quality content generates more revenue than higher quality content would have made.

It might seem counterintuitive that low quality can be an asset in the world of online content, but in this case it probably makes economic sense for Demand.  I don’t know how many long-term brand repercussions there will be for Demand’s websites and videos if they consistently fail to live up to users’ expectations.  But I suppose that probably isn’t a major concern, because new websites are easy to start up – and Demand can easily launch new brands in the future if its existing brands’ reputations are tarnished.  As long as Demand keeps producing large amounts of quick, inexpensive content that gets high Google rankings, and as long as the payouts from its pay-per-click ad revenue stream remains steady, I anticipate Demand Media’s market niche will continue to be quite profitable and sustainable.

Prove your value, social media

As companies continue to experiment with social media as part of their marketing mix, the obvious question that arises will be “how do I measure this?”.  In the past few years, metrics have been playing an increasing role in most companies’ marketing programs – and I don’t expect social media to be an exception.

1.  In a blog post last week, my friend Mike Frichol discusses how companies see value in social media, but he illustrates many reasons why they fear it.  Mike cites research that says 81% of executives think social media can enhance customer relationships and build a company’s brand.  But the downside might be reach – since so many companies block social media access for their employees, or see productivity declines.  That’s one measurement that’s pretty scary to B2B social media advocates in particular.

2.  A post by my friend Tom Pick mentions three challenges B2B marketers have in measuring their social media ROI, including: 1) it’s more PR than direct response; 2) last-click attribution; and 3) it’s more about influencing people who can influence buying decisions.

3.  A MediaPost column from yesterday lists 100 ways to measure social media.  It’s a long and impressive list of metrics which many marketers might find helpful.  These metrics at least provide a place to start when you need to gauge the effectiveness of a social media campaign.  But many of these are tough to quantify, and most don’t provide the elusive ROI numbers that Tom Pick wrote about in point 2 above.

Takeaway:  There’s no doubt metrics will play a huge role in social media’s success (or failure) at getting senior executive buy-in.  Before most companies truly embrace social media and start to shift large amounts of dollars and resources to it, the execs will need to see some solid proof that social media provides a solid return on investment.

Photo by chefranden

Ask your doctor if social media is right for you

I've been fighting a bad cold for the past couple weeks.  A week ago Sunday when my condition worsened, I went to an urgent care center to be checked out by a doctor, just to make sure I didn't have a nasty infection brewing.  The doctor said it was probably some sort of bug that I'd have to fight through, and that it was probably viral (make up your own viral marketing pun here), so antibiotics likely wouldn't help.  But then she said, "But if it would make you feel better that I’m giving you something, I'll write you a prescription for an antibiotic.  It probably won't do anything, but if you want it, I'll write it."

This experience made me think about how many individuals and companies are taking a similar approach to social media.  A marketing manager hears he's supposed to be using Twitter, or his company should have a page on Facebook, so he spends a small amount of time to establish these things.  It makes the marketing manager feel better -- so when the boss says "I've been hearing a lot about this Twitter -- what are we doing about it?", the marketing manager can tell his boss that he has already set up an account.  Never mind that their new Twitter account is probably not going to move the needle at all without some sort of planning, real thought, or concentrated effort behind it!

To many, Twitter and Facebook are the miracle drugs of the marketing world.  Even if the symptoms of the company's marketing plan don't call for them -- and even if they probably won't do anything to alleviate a company's real marketing pains -- sometimes it's just easier to write the prescription.

Photo by rodrigo senna

Would you pay $.01 or $.05 to read this blog post?

Google’s thinking you might.  After years of speculation that Google is going to get into the micropayments business, it finally appears that the search giant may extend its Google Checkout feature to take small payments for content.  This may be a dream come true for publishers, who are seeing print subscriptions plummet and advertising get scaled back.

I don’t see micropayments as the saving grace of all publishers.  You’re still going to see a tremendous number of newspapers, magazines, and even media websites closing in the coming years, as the public continues to change its media consumption habits and these media outlets simply can’t make enough money.  However, a Google micropayment system might help the more successful publishers prop up their ad revenues with another source of cash.  And because of Google’s firm grasp on a constantly increasing number of web applications, the search giant might have the best chance to push a true micropayment standard into the market.  The concept of micropayments isn’t new – it’s been kicked around since the dot-com boom of the late 1990s.  But no company has succeeded at this game…yet.

If micropayments catch on with published content like news articles, perhaps some new models might crop up in the online music business too.  Real-time streaming of music has really come into its own in the past couple years, with Pandora, MySpace Music, Fizy, and dozens of other sites that give people access to their favorite tunes.  A universal micropayment platform could be a huge win for many music sites too.

Photo by mil8

Do you have a strategy for iPhone? You should.

This chart from Morgan Stanley (via TechCrunch) tells you why:



Also consider that if Facebook was included on this chart, it would only have somewhere between 12 million and 20 million subscribers within the first two years after launch.

Digital marketers budgeting for 2010: Feels like throwing darts blindfolded

It’s a Saturday afternoon in late October, and that can only mean two things: time to watch college football, and time to do budgets.

As I’m working on my 2010 budgets, I’m wondering what the point of this exercise is.  Sure, budgets used to serve a very important purpose in business.  But after the volatility nearly everyone has experienced in their business in the past year or so, I don’t think there are many executives in any industry who are confident in their budget plans for next year.

Earlier this year, Business Finance magazine ran a cover story called “The Budget (1922-2009)” in which the author announced that the traditional way of budgeting had finally died.  And a new video on Business Finance website called Death of the Budget explores the topic in a similar way.

If the budget – which is a 13-15 month look into the future – is dead for most businesses (as many in the finance community are beginning to argue), that must mean budgets are even more dead within the digital marketing business.  How can you budget revenues, costs, or even have the foggiest of ideas what you’re going to be doing in December 2010 in such a dynamic business climate?  Think about how 15 months ago Twitter was still in its infancy as a marketing tool, few companies were using Facebook for business purposes, and the banner ad was still enjoying reasonably good click-through rates.  So what will the next 15 months bring, and how dramatically could those events completely destroy your budget plans by the end of 2010?

Long-range planning is a good thing for businesses -- but within the realm of digital marketing, I feel like the one-year budget is starting to feel like a three-year or five-year strategic plan used to feel – uncomfortable to put together at best, and the equivalent of throwing darts with your eyes closed at the worst.  I’d expect to see the most forward-thinking digital marketing companies using shorter budgeting cycles – maybe three month or six month cycles to determine revenues and spending.  For these companies, a yearly financial look ahead will be limited to strategic exercises.

Photo by wili_hybrid

Digg’s online ad unit: Relevant content on top, ad on the bottom

Yesterday TechCrunch posted a story about a new type of online ad that Digg has rolled out.

As you can see in the picture, the ad unit contains several Digg links about the sponsor at the top, along with a graphical ad at the bottom.  In this example it’s clearly labeled as sponsored by Warner Brothers, so there’s no user deception. 

TechCrunch seems to think it’s a win-win, since it’s getting clicks on Digg content that users have already found valuable, while also getting Digg some CPM ad dollars.  I think it’s a good model that Digg (and probably a number of similar sites) can use with certain advertisers in certain situations.

But the obvious downfall of this method of advertising is that not every sponsor’s product will have content that works for the top half of the ad unit.  What if most of the press on the movie Where the Wild Things Are was negative?  Warner Brothers might have trouble finding articles in Digg that were positive.  Or even more likely, what if nobody was talking about the product in the first place?  For example, I randomly did a search for “Clorox”, a typical consumer product, on Digg.  The first article that came up was one that questioned how green Clorox’s new line of GreenWorks products is. The second was about how Clorox and dozens of other companies pulled their ads from Glenn Beck’s show.  Beyond those two articles, no other Clorox article had more than one Digg.  So this type of ad unit might be best reserved for increasing buzz on a product or service that’s already getting some public attention – rather than trying to generate buzz from something that probably isn’t being talked about much in social circles (like Clorox).

Publishers have been doing these types of “editorial alongside advertising” placements for years, but Digg has done a nice job of adapting the model to its particular brand of “editorial”, if you will.

Will Google soon own the banner ad market too?

A few weeks ago Google announced that it has rolled out the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, which is a marketplace for buyers and sellers of online display advertising (i.e. banners).  An online display ad exchange is not a new idea by any means, but because this iteration has the support and brains of 800-pound gorilla Google behind it, many experts are predicting a shift in the buying and selling of banner ads.

Don’t get me wrong – I think the DoubleClick Ad Exchange has an excellent chance of grabbing a sizable chunk of the banner ad market.  But at the same time, the only way it will be anywhere nearly as successful as Google AdWords is if this new platform can address the bigger problems that currently plague online display ads.

The days of counting clicks on banners are numbered for most advertisers.  Many online marketers have known clickthroughs are not a good predictor of campaign ROI for a long time, but the movement has really gained momentum in the past year or so as clickthrough rates (CTRs) have plummeted across every industry.  So if clickthroughs shouldn’t be the ultimate metric that measures banner performance, what should be?  That’s an ongoing debate – but my bet is that brand awareness, purchase intent, and engagement will be evaluated more closely in the future.  That doesn’t bode well for the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, since it’s easy for an ad exchange to measure clicks but much harder to measure these types of metrics.

You can also look at schools of thought like the one put forth in this TechCrunch article about killing the CPM.  Perhaps DoubleClick Ad Exchange will incorporate lots of different ways to set up your campaign to address the many different types of revenue metrics currently out there.  (If there’s a company that can take a dizzyingly complex set of data and simplify it, Google is it.)

I think the success of DoubleClick Ad Exchange all comes down to whether or not Google will find the magic formula for:
1) helping advertisers reliably measure the true performance of their ads using some other metric or combination of metrics, to combat the decline of the clickthrough; and
2) balancing the needs of site owners and advertisers to find appropriate rate types that help each side.

The banner ad isn’t dead – it’s just evolving.  Now that Google is getting its hands into the market in a big way, you might not even recognize banners in a couple years.

Your site's user experience: Balance user needs and business goals

Yesterday I attended a lunch seminar on the user experience (UX) and how it needs to be a fundamental component of your website.  The presentation was given by Jason Holmes, Aaron Rosenberg, and Craig Kistler, three speakers from AG Interactive, the online arm of greeting card maker American Greetings.

They rightfully pointed out that for many websites, the experience is the product.  That's certainly the case for AG Interactive, where users come to their site to send online greeting cards, either for free or as part of a paid subscription.  If the customer's interaction with your brand is going to take place entirely online, you better be monitoring the user experience!

The presenters talked about the intersection of development, design, and experience.  If you don't have someone watching over the user experience, it can get lost in individual departments or functions.  In my own observations of websites and the way they're run, I've found that for the best results, a single person or group needs to take charge of the overall UX -- to be the "owner" of a product or a process.  If you try to divide the task to multiple people, it doesn't get done.  (For example, producing an email newsletter by committee is never a good idea, unless you have one person at the end who brings everything together and has the power to make changes for the good of the reader.)

The speakers also raised some excellent questions you should constantly be asking in regards to your UX:

• What problem are we solving?
• Why is the user here?
• How can I make it better?  (Note that the it doesn't always need to mean a website.  It could be a single page of a website, or a single element on one page of a site.)

A user experience person or team needs to balance user needs and business goals.  Sometimes a UX team can be viewed as a roadblock that gets in the way of a company's business needs.  But the key is to put UX into every process and every project, and to prove to the business people that you're trying to help them make more money -- not throw up unnecessary roadblocks.

To do UX testing if you don't have a dedicated person or team, you have a few options.  Perhaps the easiest is going into a coffee shop, offering to buy someone a cup of coffee, and asking them to look at your site's printouts or wireframes.  More complex approaches involve usability labs (a number of colleges have them), as well as remote usability testing.  AG Interactive conducts its remote testing by triggering a pop-up on a site visitor's computer, asking the user if they'd like to participate in testing.  If they agree, the UX team walks them through the process of installing simple screen-sharing software on their computer that will help the team track the user's movements.

Unfortunately, many companies do usability testing on big projects too late in the process.  Many times companies only approve a budget for UX testing when the project is finally approved.  But by that time, it's too late to make dramatic changes to the core idea of the project/product that the testing might uncover.

Here are some UX resources the presenters recommended:

• Nielsen Norman Group -- offers free white papers in the Publications section of its website
• Usability.gov
• Usability Professionals Association
  

And one of my favorite blogs that explores user experience in all areas, not just websites:

• Good Experience
  

Getting the most out of your YouTube video post

Here's a blog entry from the folks at thunder::tech with some simple but effective tactics to get the most from your YouTube videos.  I can't say it any better, so I'm not even going to try.  Just read their article for some nice nuggets on tagging, geocoding, captions, annotations, video quality, and metrics.

Lexus vs. Acura: Email marketing showdown

I love reading car reviews, like CNET's Car Tech, Consumer Reports, Gearlog Car Tech, and Car & Driver.  So I thought I'd do a little auto review of my own -- but without looking at an actual car.

Within minutes of each other, I got emails from two competing luxury car manufacturers -- Lexus and Acura.  The emails struck me as being quite similar, because they were both promoting the launch of a new vehicle in each automaker's lineup.  Because of this weird coincidence -- two very similar emails reaching me at the same time and sitting back-to-back in my inbox, I started to do some comparing and contrasting in my head.  Soon enough, I was examining each message for email marketing best practices.

Which luxury automaker came out on top of the email battle?  Let's take a look:

Round 1: Subject line and sender

(Click here to see a screenshot of how the messages appeared in my Gmail inbox.)

Since the sender name and subject line are the first thing a user sees when an email hits their inbox, this is a very important attribute to any marketing email.  Both companies simply used their brand names as the sender name, a smart move.  Both companies kept their subject lines short, which is good once again.  But neither subject line got me very excited:

"Preview the all-new 2010 Acura ZDX"
"A glimpse of the future. Inside the 2010 Lexus HS 250h"

They're both OK subjects, but Acura's lacked sizzle, since "preview" isn't exactly an exciting term.  Lexus was a bit better, although "a glimpse of the future" borders on trite.  And although it's good that both companies are putting a header in their email for people who don't have graphics turned on, they missed the opportunity to put more sizzle in the message for people whose email clients show the first line of an email (like my Gmail does here).  Starting with "This message contains graphics" is wasted space in the inbox.  On a scale of 1 to 10, my scores for each: Lexus 7, Acura 6.


Round 2: Appearance

(Click here to see screenshots of the Acura and Lexus emails.)

The emails carry a similar look and feel.  Both companies are going for a clean and elegant approach, with dark edges of both messages, simple design elements, and lack of clutter.   Both messages' appearance are effective for what they are intended to do -- get people excited about these new models.

Lexus takes you directly into the cabin, where they're highlighting one particular feature of the car -- the central controller.  Also, it's not shown in my screenshots, but the Lexus email contained an animation in the image.  The "Adjust Sound, Plan Travel, Control the Climate" phrases appeared one at a time within the email.  That little piece of eye candy got me excited about this email.  However, Lexus drops the ball in a simple place: Anyone who isn't familiar with the HS 250h will want to see what the outside of the car looks like.  Skipping an exterior shot of the car is a mistake.

On the other side, Acura gets the exterior shot right in its email, but its interior image is the question mark.  I understand the "this is brand new" feel that the viewer gets by looking at the interior sketch.  But it screams "concept car" to me, not something that's going to be coming to my car lot soon.  The whole design isn't bad, but it's not as good as what Lexus showed us.

From a being pretty standpoint, the Lexus email is better here, with a beautiful photograph and a simple but attention-getting animation.  But no exterior shot of the Lexus is a dumb move, and that takes away from it.  Scores: Acura 8, Lexus 8.


Round 3: Content

You can tell that Lexus copywriters spent more than five seconds on their headline -- "Your index finger may develop an ego."  It's smart and a little funny too.  The animation I mentioned before leads perfectly into the headline.  The text is short but sweet, perfect for an email of this type.  But again, there's no mention of the car as a whole -- especially the fact that it's the first hybrid-only Lexus.

On the other hand, the Acura headline and subheadline are two giant yawns.  The first sentence of body text about the Acura Design Studio in Southern California is pretty weak too.  I see the connection between the design studio and the sketches of the car at the bottom, but it's too much for the reader.  They care about what the car looks like, what it does and how it performs -- not where it's designed.  However, the Acura copywriters redeem themselves somewhat with the rest of the body copy, which is quite descriptive and makes me want to see the car in person.  Scores: Lexus 9, Acura 7


Round 4: Call to action

In the Lexus email, the copy works together with the call to action to get the reader excited about the technology inside.  The "Learn about all the innovation the HS 250h puts in arm's reach" works well with the big arrow graphic next to it.

Acura's call to action seems disconnected from the body copy.  The call to action wording is uninspired.  On the plus side, it's obvious that Acura wants the reader to take an action, thanks to the blue underlined text to signal a link.  But thumbs up to Acura to mention the ZDX Facebook group, because that's the sort of move that can build long-term excitement for the new model.

The Lexus call to action by itself is better here, but Acura's Facebook group mention narrows the gap.  Scores: Lexus 8, Acura 7



Summary:

Both companies made a few minor miscues, especially on the subject line.  But overall I must say that these two emails got the job done.  They were definitely better than the majority of email marketing I see.  Lexus takes the prize though, mostly thanks to its superior body copy and call to action.  Final score: Lexus 32, Acura 28.

Labor Day thoughts: morality, ethics, and online marketing

On a day that celebrates the American worker and the careers that we pursue, I think it's fitting to step back for a moment and look at the big picture about what we do for a living.

I first got started on this train of thought thanks to a post by Mark Hurst on the Good Experience blog.  Mark asks readers to ponder the value of the work you do -- not in a monetary sense, but in a "are you making a difference?" sort of way.  It's a great question many people don't examine much -- maybe because they're afraid they'll come to a conclusion that upsets them.

Here's the portion of Mark's blog post that really rattled me:

Julian Koenig, one of the most accomplished ad men of the 20th century (he was even referenced on "Mad Men"), was featured in a recent episode of my favorite radio show, "This American Life." Now at an age when he's looking back on his life and career, he had this to say about his profession:

Advertising is built on puffery, on, at heart, deception. I don't think anyone can go proudly into the next world with a career built on deception, no matter how well they do it.

That's quite a statement about your business, after a career that spans decades. And it speaks volumes about the methods and intent of advertising, that all-American activity.

Wow, what a powerful statement -- "advertising is built on deception at heart."  I'll bet Koenig would extend his statement idea to many digital marketing techniques too.  Just a few examples:

• Search engine optimization is an area of online marketing that many call into question on ethical grounds.  Critics would say the entire purpose of SEO is trying to "game" the search engines into showing your page at the top of the results.  They'd argue that whether or not you're using black hat techniques like keyword stuffing, mirror websites, cloaking, and link farms is irrelevant.  You're still trying to get your company to the top of the results by altering your website's content.
• In the B2B world especially, online lead generation is becoming a huge business.  In many cases it can be completely innocent -- but the line gets fuzzy.  When can a lead be turned over to a marketer?  Does the prospect need to explicitly express interest in the marketer's product?  What about so-called "soft leads" where the prospect took an action or matches a profile that's of interest to the marketer?
• Email marketing has its own set of ethical dilemmas.  Opt-in, double opt-in, confirmed opt-in, opt-out?  If the fine print of a company's privacy policy says it's allowed to do something with your information, are they really allowed to do it?  For example, the FTC recently ruled in a settlement with Sears that language buried deep within a privacy policy, even if completely accurate, may not be enough notice to consumers.

You could easily add dozens or hundreds of issues to this list, since advertising and marketing will always come under some sort of ethical scrutiny.  But my point here isn't to have an academic debate about the ethics of online marketing.  Instead I want to address the deeper questions Mark Hurst posed in his blog on behalf of online marketers. Can we make a difference?  Can we do good with our advertising and marketing careers?

A lot of people would start by saying you should do work you can be proud of.  Are you just cranking out what Mark Hurst calls "sorta-kinda deceptive ad copy," or do you truly believe in the products you sell?  For example, the late Billy Mays and his TV show PitchMen comes to mind.  In several episodes of PitchMen, Billy talked about how he wouldn't sell a product unless he believed in it passionately.  He did his own testing, trying the products himself or finding people who could give him their feedback on a product.  He only agreed to pitch the products he believed in.  (Of course after Billy's death, his passion for a different sort of product -- cocaine -- came to light in the autopsy.)  But very few people get to hand-pick the products they're advertising or marketing, like Billy Mays did.  So where does that leave us?

I've had several recent discussions about this topic with some very smart people.  One of them called my attention to a quote that really struck me.  The quote is from 4th century philosopher and theologian Augustine of Hippo, also known as St. Augustine.  He said: "Love God, and do what you will."  So how does that apply to this big-picture question about marketing?

• I think St. Augustine gives us a beautiful perspective of life in general.  Not everyone can have jobs that give you the warm and fuzzy "I make a fundamental difference in people's lives daily" sort of feeling.  If everyone was a pediatrician or a teacher or an attorney defending the environment, who would do the other stuff in our world?  Who would build roads, who would keep our money safe, who would serve us at restaurants, etc.?  So just because many online marketing jobs (or other jobs) don't make a fundamental difference in people's lives doesn't mean they're unworthy.
  
• Many people will look at the "do what you will" part of this quote, and take it as meaning they can do whatever they want, no matter the ethics.  "St. Augustine said I can do what I will, and I want to defraud people" is not a valid approach.  You need to look at the entire quote.
  
• St. Augustine is saying that if you love God first and foremost, anything you choose to do with your life will be a result of that love -- so you won't be able to choose a path in life that's wrong.  If you truly love God, you won't put yourself in an occupation that isn't morally or ethically ok.  You won't kill people or steal from them for a living.  And if, for example, your boss begins to ask you to do immoral or unethical things, you'll refuse to do them (and even quit your job if necessary).
• Even if you don't come from a religious background or have faith in God, you can still take a similar approach with your career.  Although it's not quite as powerful in my opinion, saying "Do good unto others, and do what you will" is still a great philosophy to guide you.
  

Most online marketers might not feel like their job makes a huge difference in people's lives every day.  But don't hang your head, my fellow marketers, because what you're doing for a living can be good.  Take St. Augustine's words to heart in everything you do, and you'll have a compass to guide you.

Blogging and tweeting through your remote control

Here's an interesting one:
TechCrunch reported that IBM has filed a patent application for a TV remote control that allows you to post what you're watching to your blog or Twitter account.  View full patent filing here.

Takeaway:  As computers, TVs, smartphones, and other electronic devices continue to converge, word-of-mouth marketing through social media will continue to grow.  Who knows -- maybe devices meant for the masses -- like this remote -- will be the technology that moves Twitter from an "early adopters" and "Internet savvy" crowd into a truly mainstream communications medium.

Google Wave and marketing: The future of online communications?

If you haven't heard about Google Wave yet, you will soon.  Google announced this upcoming product a few months ago to a lot of fanfare.  A solid launch date hasn't been publicized yet.  If Google Wave is a success, it could change the game for digital marketing and open up a ton of new possibilities -- not to mention change or outdate many current practices.

First, what is Google Wave?  Google calls it "a new model for communication and collaboration on the web."  If you want the details, the Google Wave site features an 80-minute video that describes Wave and a few short pages that give you the basic idea quickly.  From what I've seen in the sneak peeks so far, it looks like a combination of a bunch of things you already know and use -- but all in one place.  Here's a short rundown of what it is (and isn't):

• It's like email, but it's not.  It's like an email in its push delivery, but it's much more collaborative than email.  However, if Google Wave is as successful as the company hopes, waves will become as ubiquitous as email, to the point where "email me about that" might be replaced with "start a wave about that."  Google Wave is the first format I've seen that I really see as supplanting email at some point in the future.  It could be 10 or 20 years from now, but if it catches on, Wave could be an email killer.

• It's like a private blog, but it's not.  For starters, blogs are public and waves have a more private nature.  But also note that blogs are a one-way communication device that allow feedback and comments to be posted below the entry.  The feedback never truly becomes an integral element of the conversation -- it's just an add-on.  But with a wave, anything written will end up being a collaboration.  Imagine if you could edit this blog post in real time, and have others see what you changed.  They'd still be able to see my original text if they wanted to, but now you'd have the ability to weigh in.

• It's like a wiki, but it's not.  A wiki allows collaboration, but it doesn't have a built-in distribution mechanism like email or an instant message does.  Crossing a wiki with an email might be a good way to think of a wave.

• It's like Google Docs, but it's not.  Google Docs has some of the tools for collaboration, like a way to see what each author changed, and to see edits from multiple authors in a convenient online tool.  But Google Docs is more like Microsoft Word put online with a few collaboration features built in.  Wave promises to be a true real-time conversation, where people can work together simultaneously with real-time visibility and instant notification of updates.

• It's like a conversation over a kitchen table, but it's not.  If you and I were talking face-to-face at a table, we could exchange ideas, comment, debate, and share things like photos and documents (provided they were printed out of course).  Google Wave gives you all of this functionality, but it gives you something that a kitchen table conversation doesn't -- the ability to time shift it.  For a kitchen table conversation, both people need to be there.  But with a wave, it can be held in real-time but it doesn't need to be.  In this way it's more like email, for its time-shifting abilities.

So why is Google Wave a potential game-changer for digital marketers?  It has the potential to make marketing in social media more highly engaged, more personalized, and more conversational.

• A software company could let the users of its products collaborate on ideas for new releases, bug fixes and updates.
  
  
• I'm installing a new floor in my kitchen right now, so the example of a flooring manufacturer comes to mind.  A flooring manufacturer could put their installation instructions and videos in a wave, then invite customers to the wave.  Customers can add their own tips, pictures and experiences installing their floor -- but in a real-time environment.
  
  
• It could also be huge for product development.  Any company can use waves internally to let their product development teams collaborate for new product updates and revisions.  Every company's intranet could be a series of waves.  Every project going on within a company could be a series of waves.

Can all of these tasks be accomplished without Google Wave?  Certainly.  But Google Wave might be the tool that can improve all these types of communication -- giving a new collaborative twist to the exchanging of ideas online.

Your banner ad's response rate might be double what you think it is

A couple weeks ago I wrote this post about making your web display advertising "blend in" better to improve your click-through rate.  That's certainly one way to go with your ads, but it's not the only way.

Hundreds of articles and studies have discussed the significant branding component a banner ad can have.  But few have said it as simply as Seth Godin in this blog post, where he compares banner ads to posters for Gonzaga University that features basketball players, banking on the fact that their big-name basketball team will help to lure prospective students.

A recent study from iProspect found that nearly as many people respond to a banner ad by doing a search for the product, brand or company (27%) as the number of people who actually click on the ad (31%).  Read full article on MediaBuyerPlanner here.  That's huge.  This study is saying you could basically take your CTR and double it, for a more accurate look at your banner ad's true response rate.  (Yes, I realize there are certain methodological flaws with doing exactly that...but go with me here for a second...)

In other words:

• If your bosses are measuring your campaigns solely on click-throughs, you should either try to optimize your ads to generate the most clicks (as I discussed on 7/21), or you should convince them why looking at CTR by itself is an incomplete picture of the campaign's success.  Sure, CTR can have a lot of value -- but it should never be the only metric you look at.
• If you can use a more sophisticated measurement mechanism to help you track the overall response to the ads -- whether through click-through, search, social media, etc. -- do it.  I'm sure there are a few ad tracking solutions out there that are already going in this direction.  But I guarantee you'll see a lot more popping up in the next few years, as the overall value of a banner ad is more broadly understood.

Approach routine tasks from a different angle

I have a pre-defined route for my 45-minute commute to and from my office in downtown Cleveland.  Because of traffic patterns, in the morning I exit the highway quite far from my parking lot and drive through city streets to get there.  But in the evening, because traffic flow is a lot different and I'm usually leaving the office late, I hop on the highway ramp that's closest to my lot.  I've found it's quickest to follow that pattern.

This morning I tried something different.  Today when coming into work, I passed up my normal exit and got off at the place I normally enter the highway in the evening.  Both common sense and my knowledge of the traffic patterns around downtown tell me that this morning's unusual route would take longer...and sure enough, it did take a little longer.

But when I gained was quite interesting.  Since I'm used to driving that road when I leave work every day, I figured everything would seem the same -- since I was on the same road, just going in a different direction than usual.  But I was wrong.  I can't even begin to tell you how many new things I saw this morning.  It's a short drive -- probably only a mile -- but while driving westbound on this road I saw at least a half dozen buildings, signs and businesses that I've never seen in my normal evening eastbound commute on the same street.  It was a completely different experience.  And I learned some things I didn't know before.

I guess all I'm trying to say is this:  Try doing some of your routine tasks a little differently today.  Come at them with fresh eyes, from a different angle, looking for different things.  Don't treat them as normal.  They might take you a little longer -- like my drive this morning took a little longer than it could have -- but I'll bet you'll get a whole new perspective on them.  And who knows, maybe you'll discover a new way to do things, a process improvement, or maybe you'll gain a new appreciation for those routine tasks.

Why you DON'T want your advertising to stand out

A great quote about online advertising from Noah Brier on AdAge.com:

Banner blindness is a well-documented phenomenon, but little has been written about why people ignore the ads. My suspicion is that it's in large part due to the fact that they look like they don't belong on the page. When there's a big orange ad amongst the black and white content of the New York Times it's kind of like wearing a big sign that says, "Don't pay attention to me!"

This is absolutely true.  I see it all the time.  The advertisers who think about their ads -- who it's going to, where it's going on a page, what it should look like -- and design their creative around those parameters are way more successful.

For a campaign that ran for three-month periods the past couple years, one of my colleagues had the opportunity to design the ad creative.  It was a custom program, and the advertiser trusted us enough to assemble the right messaging and look for the leaderboards, rectangles and skyscrapers.  Since my colleague knew exactly where on the site the ad would run, plus knowing all the hot topics that get our site's audience excited, he selected a creative approach that meshed well with the location and audience desires.  The reward was an incredibly high 2.0% click through rate on the rectangle creative (that's for a static GIF, not any type of rich media!).

If advertisers and agencies spent the extra time to do serious creative planning for a campaign, they'd be able to boost the campaign's performance immediately.  That's why often you don't want to make your advertising stand out.  Integrate the message and content closely with the site, and you'll see a big payoff.

New research on marketing during a recession

Throughout 2009 I've seen plenty of articles and white papers about the benefits of keeping your marketing and advertising spends steady during a recession -- or even better, increasing them.  Some of these pop up every time we see an economic slowdown (I remember seeing one particular piece on advertising during a recession back in 2001-2002, and of course it has reappeared with the recent economy).

Here's a brand new piece of research published by Real Results Marketing and Al Dente Marketing, that examines the marketing of 188 companies (download PDF here).  The majority of these marketers (61%) are in B2B.  Although the sample size isn't huge and this study seems to skew toward smaller companies, it still has some interesting takeaways.  While it's of course too early to see how well these companies fare in terms of market share, revenue growth, etc. as the economy improves, many of the numbers and associated comments are quite interesting.  The companies that are cutting marketing are doing so by 35%, while the companies that are increasing their marketing are spending 26% more.  That's a huge disparity -- and it's easy to see how the companies that are investing now could end up seeing a huge payback in the coming years.

Not surprising, you'll see that many of these companies are trying more social media tactics, as well as increasing effort on their marketing programs.  Webinars were also an area cited by many as being in their growth plans.

Update on MINE magazine

A couple months ago I wrote about MINE magazine (see blog entry here) and its unique approach for repurposing content, packaging it with an advertiser's message, and re-distributing it to readers.  MINE recently won two awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

I've received about half of my 10 issues of MINE magazine in the mail now, and I have to say I'm pretty impressed.  It's an interesting mix of content.  When I was first signing up for it, I thought the variety of content from such a wide range of magzines seemed random.  But it's really not that different from a mix of different types of music on an iPod.

The other thing about MINE that's impressed me is the advertising.  Each of the four Lexus ads that appear in the magazine are personalized, using the information I provided at registration.  Some of these ads include my name, my city of residence, or a couple of the interests I specified on the reg form.  It feels a little strange to see this kind of personalization in print -- we're used to seeing web ads with this level of personalization, but print ads usually don't go to this level.  But it's done tastefully -- and I feel like it's boosted my impression of Lexus as a brand that's interested in my needs.

If a printed magazine (long perceived as being slow or unable to keep up with online campaigns' personalization and targeting) is getting this customized, what's your excuse for implementing more customization in your online campaigns?

Great viral video about the media transformation

Old media companies that can't make the digital transformation are doomed.  Here's a wonderful viral video that was posted to YouTube last week.  I don't need to add much more -- the song pretty much sums it up.

How would you prefer to be contacted?

When collecting contact information on an online form, doesn't it make sense to ask the person for their preferences?  It seems like common sense, but at least 90% of the forms I see don't have that type of option.

Here's an example.  In the world of trade magazines, qualifying and re-qualifying subscribers is a major business expense.  Some trade publications spend more than a million dollars a year making calls, sending direct mail and emails, doing cover wraps on their magazines, and doing co-registration to reach their circulation goals.  Once you have a subscriber's name on your file, you have to re-qualify them every so often, to make sure they're still at the same place and to update their info.  But most trade publications don't bother to ask you how you'd like to be contacted for circulation renewals.  They just start sending you emails, or making phone calls, or sending you direct mail pieces until you renew.

In the 9 years I've been in trade publishing, I've never seen a requalification form as smart (yet simple!) as this one from Website Magazine.  After you change/verify your contact info and purchasing influences, you're taken to this screen where you specify how you'd like to be contacted for circulation renewals.  They provide all sorts of options, from email to text messages and calls on your mobile phone, to an alternate email address, business phone, and a postcard.  Plus they even give you a text box to include your comments or additional information.

It's simple, effective, personal, and user-focused.  It probably saves them a ton of money.  Why don't more websites do this?

Take control of your name in search results

As college graduates prepare to enter one of the toughest job markets in modern times, not only do they need to worry about the normal job seeking advice like keeping their resume short, writing a good cover lettter, never showing up to an interview late, etc.  But now they might need to Google bomb themselves, as Avelyn Austin points out in this excellent post.  Facebook pictures, YouTube videos, or other incriminating evidence might make an employer think twice about hiring you.  Some job seekers may employ the Google bomb tactic (basically trying to manipulate the search engines so more flattering results appear on the first page).

Google itself has come out with a new tool that might help people take more control of their identities online.  Called Google Profile, it lets you "control how you appear on Google and tell others a bit more about who you are."   Google claims that with a Google profile, "you can easily share your web content on one central location. You can include, for example, links to your blog, online photos, and other profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and more."

It will be interesting to see how well Google Profiles rank in Google.  Will a search on a name turn up a Google Profile in the top few results, on top of the Facebook and LinkedIn results that now dominate many name searches?  If so, this might be an excellent way for people to give the world a more organized view of themselves within search results.  Google Profile might be an easier alternative to buying a domain name for yourself and setting up your own website to serve as a hub for your online identity.  (Personally, I'll stick to www.michaelmadej.com as the center of the brand that is myself, but I can see how many people might not want to go to that extra effort.)

I spent a few minutes adding my own profile to Google Profile, just to see how well it works and what kind of information it asks for.  At this point it appears to be pretty sparse, but in time I have a feeling they'll be adding more to this tool.

I still think back to this Wall Street Journal article from a few years ago, about parents picking names that will be easily findable in Google.  Maybe none of this naming stuff will be an issue when these kids grow up though -- perhaps search will be so advanced (or so integrated into everything else we do) that a unique name won't be necessary for Google results.  In reality, I think names will matter less and less as the technology gets smarter at pegging exactly who you are.

Rate my ad!

Update 6/11/09:  Read more details on Digg Ads

Recently social bookmarking site Digg announced a new initiative for its advertising, where the users rate the ads and discuss them.  Poor performing ads have to pay more, or get kicked off the site.  (Details here in the MediaVision blog)  It's an interesting concept, and it just might be crazy enough to work.

Remember a decade ago when everyone thought search results needed to be unbiased and "editorial", rather than being paid?  At the time, GoTo (later Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing), and later Google AdSense and MSN adCenter have proven that the users "voting with their mice" for pay-per-click advertising is a smart and lucrative business model.

Will people vote for ads?  Comment on ads?  Similar functionality already exists in Facebook, with the thumbs up or thumbs down button next to each ad.  It sounds like Digg plans to take this to the next level, although I couldn't find any further details on their plans yet.  Update 6/11/09:  Read more details on Digg Ads

Certain kinds of ads are likely to work well here.  Think about the Super Bowl, where you have day-after-the-game reviews of the ads in every major newspaper and TV station, plus dozens of websites.  People will weigh in on advertising.  But is Super Bowl advertising different, since companies are spending millions of dollars on the airtime and likely six or seven figures making each 30-second spot?  How will that model translate to a simple online ad, created by a not-so-talented marketing manager in less than an hour?  That's where I fear the Digg model may fall down.

But whether or not it works, kudos to Digg for trying something new.  If this type of model is going to work anywhere, Digg is probably the place -- since the whole site is based on people voting for articles.

Sometimes the most simple contests are the most successful

As I was sorting through my postal mail the other day, I saw an ad for a heating and air conditioning company that caught my eye.  The reason I noticed this ad promoting a contest is because of its simplicity.  It's nothing new, nothing groundbreaking...but still smart.  Cyngier Heating & Air Conditioning is running an "oldest furnace" contest.  If you are found to have the oldest furnace, you win a new furnace.

The reason I like this promotion is because it's directly tied to the company's line of business.  Usually you see "win an iPod for filling out this survey" or "win a free vacation" when the prize has nothing to do with the company who is sponsoring it.  But in this case they're giving away a furnace -- which makes sense.  But more importantly, Cyngier is going to end up with a stack of entries for people who are admitting they have an old furnace.  I'd imagine that's a pretty valuable list, since it'll allow them to approach the non-winners with an offer to sell them a new furnace.

A few ways Cyngier could make their contest better next time:

1. If the customer can't verify the age of their furnace, the fine print says they can't win.  I don't know a lot about furnaces, but my guess is it's going to be very hard for most people to verify the age of their furnace.  That seems like a deal-breaker to many people who otherwise might consider entering.  I know my furnace has its date of manufacture stamped on it, perhaps many others do too.  A friendly note in the contest description to that effect might be helpful.  Or if people can't verify the age, let them enter anyway for the potential to win a secondary prize.
   
2. Cyngier isn't really interested in the oldest furnace, they're more interested in finding a bunch of people with old furnaces.  They could set up a similar promotion that invites people to enter any furnace that is at least 20 years old, then hold a random drawing.  Under the current contest, homeowners who have a 25 year old furnace probably don't have much motive to enter, since they'll be pretty sure someone has a 30 or 50 year old furnace.
   
3. Instead of needing to print a PDF and fill out a sheet of paper to enter, make the entry form online.
4. Tie it into social media.  Ask people to take digital pictures of their old furnace when they enter (an optional part of the contest), then let people browse the pictures on the Cyngier website.
   
5. A "tell a friend" about this contest is a no-brainer too.

Suggestions aside, this type of contest is a smart and simple way for a business to drive new sales leads.  Can you tie your company's sales leads to a contest like this?

New Facebook Chat: An example of social media going anti-social

Within the past couple days, Facebook rolled out new functionality for its chat application.  The old system only allowed you to be "online" or "offline" for chat purposes -- there was no in between.  So either all your friends were able to chat with you, or none of them were.

With the new functionality (see official Facebook blog post here, and AllFacebook.com explanation here), now you can allow certain groups to see you online and chat with you, while appearing offline and inaccessible for chat with others.  Now you're in control of who can and can't chat with you.

This isn't new technology or a new idea.  You've been able to appear offline to certain users or certain groups within IM applications for a long time.  But this is groundbreaking for Facebook.

Thanks to this change, I'm sure there will be plenty of people I'll never see in my Facebook chat window again.  I guarantee some people will only allow chatting with a specific circle of their friends.  And people will be able to go "into hiding" a lot easier, where they're chattable to only one or two people, while the rest of the world can't see they're online.

Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but this feature sounds more anti-social to me.  It'll make avoiding particular people on Facebook a lot easier.  But if you don't want to talk to certain people on Facebook, why are you friends with them?  (That's a rhetorical question)

Even though I call the new Facebook Chat anti-social, it certainly has its benefits.  Will I use it?  No doubt I will.  But that doesn't make it any less anti-social.

Photo by r-z

Your website is thirsty. Water it.

I don't like to update web pages I assembled a long time ago.  If I've seen the page hundreds of times, and if the initial thrill of creating it is long gone, it becomes difficult to stay on top of updates.  Those types of pages give me a "been there, done that" type of feeling.

Updating old web pages isn't a challenge.  I'd much rather create something new!  Where's the triumph, where's the challenge in working on old pages?  But yes, care and maintenance is critical to a healthy website.

This afternoon my wife and I went to the nursery to buy some new shrubs.  The only reason we needed to buy new shrubs is because four of ours died in the past year, and it's finally time to rip out the old and put in the new.  And I know why they died -- because I'm bad with plants.  Plants hate me because I don't take care of them well.  I don't prune shrubs, I don't water them during dry spells, and I certainly don't protect them in the winter or fertilize them often enough.

Think about your website(s).  How often do you prune them (remove old content, look for dead links)?  How often do you give them the maintenance they deserve?  Do you take existing pages for granted, and only get excited when you're creating a new page (just like I take my existing shrubs for granted, and only spend time thinking about them once they've died and I need to buy new ones)?

This week, give some tender loving care to a section of your website you haven't looked at in a long time.  What can you do to remove the dead wood?  How can you make it stronger?  Are there ways you can build it into something that can blossom?  If you give a little thought to SEO on these neglected pages, can you help to pollinate the search engines and drive more traffic?

Photo by Art Poskanzer

Every day we make it, we'll make it the best we can

his week I'm on the road in Nashville, working at the IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference.  It's a gathering of manufacturing leaders who are striving for continuous improvement in their manufacturing facilities.  As part of the conference we offer plant tours, and today I was the tour captain of a journey to Lynchburg, Tennessee to visit the Jack Daniel's distillery.

One of my favorite takeaways from today's tour (other than the whiskey tasting) was the culture the company pursues.  Jack Daniel himself uttered these words about the company's Tennessee whiskey: "Every day we make it, we'll make it the best we can."

Every day you come to work, are you doing your best at your job?  Are you going out of your way to put the best possible ingredients into your work, like Jack Daniel's puts into their whiskey?  It's a simple concept, but sometimes when we get lost in the daily grind, we need a reminder.

Squeeze new life out of your existing content

Your content is valuable.  You spend lots of time and money developing white papers, articles, and other pieces of content for your website and other electronic offerings.  But how often do you let your content go stale?  Once it's finished and published, that shouldn't be the end -- it should be the beginning of the process.  There are so many ways you can continue to use content that's already been developed.  Repurpose it!

A great example is Time Inc's new custom magazine, called MINE.  Readers can sign up to receive five free issues of MINE, which contains re-purposed editorial content that previously appeared in one of Time Inc's or American Express Publishing's magazines.  Interestingly, it's a custom publication that's specifically designed for each reader.  A reader has eight magazine choices -- from Sports Illustrated to Golf Magazine to Food & Wine.  The reader chooses which five magazines they're interested in receiving content from, and the custom publication is sent to them.  In addition, readers can choose whether to receive their custom magazine in a printed or digital format.  Think of it as a remix of a magazine.

It's an interesting model because it:
1) Capitalizes on previously developed magazine content that would've otherwise been generating little interest in Time's archives, so it's inexpensive for Time to do.
2) Satisfies Lexus, the sponsor of the whole initiative, because it generates leads (from the MINE registration form).  It also helps Lexus position itself as a brand that listens to customers, since it's giving them a free subscription to a customized magazine.
3) Gives the reader what they want -- a mix of content they're interested in, but might not have otherwise been exposed to.  Chances are good most readers aren't receiving five different Time magazines, so this gives the company a chance to showcase several of its other titles to an audience that might not have otherwise seen them.  For example, I chose Travel + Leisure as one of the titles in my custom magazine -- a brand I've never interacted with in the past.  This could help Time get readers hooked on new titles and interacting with brands they were previously unaware of.  In short, it's a clever circulation initiative too.

Is this the future of magazines, where consumers can choose the content and "bind their own"?  Probably not.  I think publishers would quickly find the costs to be too high to do this on a large scale.  But it's an interesting custom project when it leans on repurposed content from past magazine issues, as Time and Lexus are doing.

Think about this model.  Are there new and different things you can be doing with your content?  How can you repackage your content and bring it to the audience in a different way?  Maybe it's not a huge component of your overall content strategy, but why not squeeze a little more life out of your existing content?  After all, you already paid for it.

Photo by jrob86

Three value-conscious tools for online marketers

Digital marketers need to wear a lot of hats.  One minute we might be writing copy, the next we're tweaking graphics in Photoshop, and the next we're shooting or editing video.  This profession takes a variety of skills, and it also requires a lot of tools.  Often those tools need to be as inexpensive as possible, because while some projects have big budgets, others are being run on a shoestring.

Today I'd like to look at a few simple tools that can make your life easier without breaking the bank.  (All of these are written as my own personal viewpoint...nobody's paying me to write these endorsements.)

• Need to shoot good-looking video, but don't have the budget for a studio?  The Westcott Photo Basics PB500 Educational 3-Light Kit can provide good lighting for simple "talking head" or interview videos.  Of course for less than $500, you can't expect professional quality...especially when pros are easily spending 10 times that amount for a simple lighting setup!  But this kit gets the job done for non-pros, even people with no previous experience in lighting.  It comes with an instructional DVD and a reference card that will get you set up.  Even though the DVD focuses on still photography, it still provides good takeaways that apply to simple video shoots.  With a Google search, I was able to find this kit for $369 here.
  
  
• For podcasts and simple audio editing, Audacity is a solid product at a price you can't beat: free.  It doesn't come with all the goodies you'll want (like MP3 capability) with the main download.  You'll need to spend a few minutes downloading add-ons and filters that do everything you need.  But that's a quick and painless one-time process.  The software itself is solid, fast, and relatively easy to use.  There are a few controls that aren't the most logical, and newbies to the audio editing world will need to spend a few hours playing around with the software and reading about it until they feel comfortable.  Luckily, Audacity has some great documentation, tutorials, and even a wiki where you can learn how to do just about anything.  Goldwave is another solid choice for audio editing that I used for many years, and it comes with more capabilities.  But it also costs $45.  Audacity can get the job done for free, which is why it's a no-brainer for podcast and webcast audio editing.

• My favorite new tool is called Dropbox.  It's basically like a Flash drive that you don't need to carry, but even better.  With Dropbox, you can store files online in an easy-to-access tool.  It has automatic synchronization so the files are always ready on your computer when you need them, which is especially handy if you regularly work on more than one computer.  You can also use it to share files with friends -- either a single file they might need to grab quickly, or an entire folder for long-term collaboration.  The software you download onto your computer is slick, giving you drag-and-drop ease of use.  It has a web interface too, so you can access files from a friend’s computer or wherever you are.  With Dropbox, you might never need to email files to yourself anymore.  I've tried several online file exchange services before, and Dropbox is by far the best.  Plus it's free for 2GB of storage space!  You can pay for additional storage if you need it.  (If you sign up using my referrer tracking link, you get an extra 250MB of bonus storage...and I get an extra 250MB too.  Here's my referral link that gives you the bonus 250MB.  If you don't want to use my referral link and you're happy with the standard amount of storage, you can sign up here).